Electrical paperwork rarely comes up when a flat goes on the market. It comes up about six weeks later, in a list of enquiries from the buyer's solicitor, at the exact moment everybody wants to exchange. By then it has stopped being an administrative question and become a negotiating one, which is a bad place for it to be. This page explains what is actually asked for when you sell a flat in England, what you are and are not obliged to hold, and how to deal with the very common situation of work that was done years ago by someone whose name you no longer remember.
The first thing to be clear about
There is generally no legal requirement to hold an electrical condition report simply because you are selling your own home. Nobody can compel you to commission one, and a sale is not blocked by its absence. That is worth saying plainly, because a certain amount of marketing implies otherwise.
The duty that people are thinking of applies to rented property. Under the Electrical Safety Standards in the Private Rented Sector (England) Regulations 2020, rented homes in England require an EICR at least every five years. If you are selling with a tenant in situ, or your buyer is buying to let, that obligation is very much live — but it belongs to whoever is the landlord, not to the act of selling. Our guides to EICR landlord requirements and EICR certificate costs cover that side in detail.
So the real subject of this page is not obligation. It is evidence — what the buyer's side will ask you to prove, and what happens if you cannot.
What conveyancing enquiries actually chase
The standard property information forms used in a sale ask the seller about works carried out at the property and about the guarantees and consents that go with them. That is the hook. Electrical work in dwellings falls under Building Regulations Part P, and installations are designed and tested to BS 7671, so where notifiable electrical work has been done — a new consumer unit, a rewire, new circuits, work in a bathroom or kitchen — there ought to be certification and a record of notification. The buyer's solicitor is looking for that record.
The three documents that turn up in this conversation are not interchangeable, and confusing them wastes time:
- Electrical Installation Certificate. Issued for new installation work — a rewire, a new board, a new circuit. It says "this work was designed, installed and tested, and here are the results." It is specific to work that was done, on a date, by someone.
- Minor Electrical Installation Works Certificate. The equivalent for smaller work that adds to or alters an existing circuit rather than creating a new one.
- Electrical Installation Condition Report (EICR). Not a certificate for work at all. It is an inspection of the installation as it stands today, producing observations with codes according to their seriousness. It says what condition the installation is in — it does not say who did what, or that anything complied with the regulations at the time.
That distinction matters because sellers often try to answer a Part P question with an EICR. It is not the same thing. An EICR is evidence of condition, not of compliance history. It can be genuinely useful in a sale, but it does not retrospectively certify somebody else's work.
The other document a leasehold buyer will want
In leasehold flats — which is most of prime Central London — there is a parallel enquiry that catches more sellers out than the electrical one. Most leases require the freeholder's or managing agent's consent for alterations, typically through a licence to alter. If a previous rewire, a kitchen, or a bathroom involved alterations, the buyer's solicitor may well ask for evidence that consent was obtained. Many freeholds in this area sit with large estates and their requirements vary — the position on your own building has to be checked against your own lease rather than inferred. Our guide to a licence to alter in a mansion block explains how that process usually runs. If consent was never obtained, that is a conversation for your solicitor and your managing agent, and it is not one to start the week of exchange.
The common problem: work was done, paperwork was not kept
This is the situation in a very large share of Central London flats. A board was changed at some point. A kitchen was refitted. Someone put a shower in. The work looks fine, and there is no paperwork whatsoever, because it was three owners ago.
Your options, honestly stated:
Find the original. The obvious first step and the one people skip. Check the file from your own purchase — certificates often sit in the bundle your solicitor sent you and were never looked at again. If you know who did the work, ask them; competent contractors keep records, and a duplicate may exist. If the work went through a competent person scheme, the scheme itself may hold a record.
Talk to your solicitor about the legal routes. There are established ways of dealing with missing building regulations evidence on a sale. They are matters of conveyancing rather than of electrics, they have costs and conditions, and the appropriate route depends entirely on the facts. Ask your solicitor early — that is precisely what they are for. What we would say is that no electrician can create a certificate for work they did not do and did not see installed, and you should treat anyone who offers to backdate one as a warning about everything else they might do.
Commission an EICR. What an inspection can honestly do is establish the condition of the installation now. It will not prove that the 2009 board change was notified. It will tell a buyer that the installation as it stands has been examined by someone competent, with the observations recorded and coded. In practice that reassures a great many buyers, and it changes the conversation from "we have no idea what is behind these walls" to "here is a report". It has a second, blunter benefit: you find out what is there before your buyer's surveyor does.
Why timing decides how much this costs you
The difference between commissioning an inspection when you list and commissioning one when the enquiries land is not the price of the inspection. It is the price of everything the inspection finds.
Discovered early, an observation about missing bonding or a poor circuit is a small job you arrange calmly at a fixed price. Discovered at week six, the same observation is a buyer's negotiating point, and buyers do not price remedial work the way contractors do — they price it as a discount plus an allowance for anxiety. The identical fault is worth far more against you at the end of a chain than at the start of one. In older Central London stock — Victorian conversions in Bayswater, mansion block flats in Maida Vale, Georgian buildings in Marylebone — the chance of an inspection producing at least some observations is high enough that it is worth knowing early rather than late.
Early information also lets you choose. Some observations are worth fixing before marketing because they are cheap and they remove a talking point. Some are worth leaving and disclosing, because the buyer is gutting the flat anyway and will not thank you for a new board they intend to move. That is a judgement you can only make if you have the report in hand while you still have time.
If a survey has already flagged something
Buyers' surveyors routinely note that the electrical installation is old, appears to be of an earlier standard, or should be inspected by a qualified electrician before purchase. That paragraph is close to boilerplate on period stock and it is not a finding. The correct response is not to panic and rewire; it is to have the installation actually tested, so that a vague sentence is replaced by measurements. Frequently the measurements are better than the sentence implied. Where they are not, our guides to fuse board replacement and rewiring a period property explain the proportionate responses — a board change and a rewire are very different jobs, and the report should tell you which one, if either, is warranted.
The certificate a sale does normally involve: the EPC
While we are on paperwork, the one document that does routinely attach to marketing a property in England is the Energy Performance Certificate rather than anything electrical. Sellers regularly confuse the two, or assume their agent has it in hand when the flat has never had one. Confirm the current requirement and timing with your agent or solicitor rather than with an article — but in practice, if you are marketing, this is the certificate that will actually be asked for.
Our EPC prices are published and set by property type, and they exclude VAT:
- Flats and studios — £65 to £110
- Semi-detached — £75 to £140
- Detached — £85 to £150
The spread within each type is about size and layout: an assessor has to visit every room, record the construction, the heating, the glazing, the insulation and the controls, and a large mansion flat with four bedrooms, two heating zones and a hundred years of alterations takes longer to survey than a studio. In prime Central London the flats figure is the one that applies to most sellers, and period conversions sit at the upper end of it more often than the lower, because there is more to record and less of it is standard.
An EPC is also worth getting early for the same reason as an inspection: it tells you something before your buyer learns it. A poor rating on a period flat is not a disaster in a sale, but it is a conversation, and it is a much better conversation when you already know the answer and what the recommendations say.
If you are selling a rental
Different rules and no ambiguity. The five-yearly EICR duty for rented homes in England applies while it is let, and your buyer, if they are also a landlord, will expect a current report and evidence that any required remedial work was done. Handing over a clean set of records is one of the few things that genuinely speeds a landlord-to-landlord sale, because the buyer inherits a compliance position rather than a mystery. A complete record set means the current report, the certificates for any remedial work, and the dates.
How we handle sale work
We inspect, we report, and we tell you which observations are worth acting on before marketing and which are not — including when the answer is to do nothing. An EICR is priced by bedroom count: £150 one bed, £170 two bed, £190 three bed, £210 four bed and above. An EPC is £65 to £110 for a flat or studio, £75 to £140 semi-detached, £85 to £150 detached. All prices exclude VAT. Other electrical work starts from £80 excluding VAT, published on the electrical page, and any remedial work is quoted as a fixed price against a written scope before it starts, so you can hand a buyer a number rather than an unknown.
Against the value of a Central London flat these are small figures, and that is rather the point of getting them done at the start of a sale instead of the middle. A report commissioned when you list costs the same as one commissioned in week six of the enquiries. The difference is that in the first case the findings are jobs you schedule, and in the second they are a discount someone else calculates.
We work with agents on this regularly, and our estate agent service is set up for sale-driven timescales, including getting into a tenanted or managed flat with the access booked properly. For landlords with several flats, keeping the electrical records current as you go costs less than assembling them under deadline.
If you are preparing a flat for sale and want to know where you stand before the enquiries arrive, get in touch.